Three Rings

Down in Washington, last week, Roger Clemens went on trial for the second time, and, over in Oslo, Anders Breivik, the confessed killer of seventy-seven innocents, took the stand in his own so-called defense. (“I did this out of goodness, not evil,” he said. “I would have done it again.”) Local court buffs needn’t be envious: in the course of a day’s elevator hopping, in downtown Brooklyn, it was possible to observe a tabloid trifecta of criminal proceedings—terrorism, the Mob, and embezzlement by politicians. No credential or admittance fee required, but turn your phone off, please, and leave it with the marshal after you pass through the metal detector.

First stop: Judge John Gleeson’s courtroom, on the sixth floor. Opening statements in the matter of U.S.A. v. Medunjanin. “You’re going to get an inside look at Al Qaeda and its secretive inner workings,” James Loonam, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, said. “One of these Al Qaeda terrorists is in this courtroom right now.” He meant the defendant, Adis Medunjanin, an American citizen, who had neglected to trim his beard or to put on a necktie for the jury. Medunjanin, one learned, was born in 1984 in Bosnia (at the time, Yugoslavia), and moved with his family to the United States when he was eight. They settled in Queens. His sister attended nursing school. He attended Flushing High School, where he played football, and, later, Queens College, majoring in economics.

“He was serious, studious, and sincere in his religious beliefs,” Robert Gottlieb, Medunjanin’s lead lawyer, said. Those beliefs led him to travel to Pakistan, in 2008, and to adopt the name Muhammad. In Peshawar, he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to Afghanistan, where he hoped to volunteer for the Taliban, but he was rebuffed at the border. “Adis truly was the stranger in a strange land,” Gottlieb said. “He came this close to being arrested as a spy.” Deflated, he returned home to Queens, where he either did or did not conspire to bomb the New York City subway system. When the F.B.I. showed up at his house, in 2010, he took off in his Nissan Altima and, in an act of suicidal desperation, rear-ended a car on the Whitestone Expressway, but not before calling 911 and swearing his allegiance to Allah. “Even after his arrest, the defendant asked the United States government to . . . be traded to the Taliban,” Loonam, the prosecutor, said. “As you can see, the defendant was not traded to the Taliban.”

Midmorning recess in Judge Gleeson’s court afforded an opportunity to visit the eighth floor, where an F.B.I. agent was in the witness box beside Judge Brian Cogan, identifying the heavyset men in footage recorded by a camera “secreted” within the Torrese Social Club: Dino Calabro, Benjamin (Claw) Castellazzo, Vincent (Jimmy Gooch) Febbraro, Sal Fusco, Sr., Thomas Gioeli. “That’s Jack DeRoss with the cigar right there,” he said. Gioeli, a.k.a. Tommy Shots, an alleged Colombo-family kingpin, sat at the defense table in an Argyle sweater, smirking. In the second row of the gallery, an elegant woman—a Hollywood scriptwriter conducting research—whispered that Gioeli had been maintaining a blog (Alleged Mob Boss Tommy Gioeli’s Voice) from prison. The blog that day linked to a radio interview that Gioeli had given, via a prison phone, in which he discussed “Juror No. 5,” or “my ideal juror,” a dreadlocked man who had apparently become skittish after receiving a series of hang-up phone calls at his home. “Supposedly he sees a guy—an Italian guy—in front of his house with a duffelbag,” Gioeli said. “Now he’s a little concerned.” Juror No. 5 was no longer a man with dreadlocks.

After lunch at the Park Plaza diner, among assorted G-men and track-suited hustlers, it was up to the tenth floor: Judge Frederic Block’s courtroom. Pedro Espada, the former majority leader of the New York State Senate, and his son Pedro, a onetime assemblyman, were facing charges of defrauding the nonprofit Soundview Health Care Network, in the Bronx, of more than half a million dollars. An accountant was testifying about some iffy business expenses the younger Espada had put in for: a Rite Aid receipt for shaving gel, razors, and dental floss (orange- and mint-flavored), marked as “office supplies,” and a “working lunch” bill from a sushi restaurant in Fairfield, Connecticut, time-stamped 6:11 P.M. Small-time, given the alternatives.

Down, again, to six, where Zarein Ahmedzay, a Flushing High classmate and admitted co-conspirator of Medunjanin’s, was undergoing cross-examination, dressed in a government-issued jumpsuit. He had turned state’s witness. “Now, you are an admitted terrorist?” Gottlieb asked.

“Yes. . . .”

“Admitted you were going to bomb New York City subways, correct?”

“Yes. . . .”

“Would you lie to a jury?”

“No.”

“Depending on how this goes, you can get anywhere from zero years for your crimes to life. . . .”

“I hope to get that zero years that you mentioned, sir.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.